Sub genres in the arts are transitory by nature, given that they rise to prominence and eventually fade away based on whatever trends happen to be popular at the time. It's the reason why young adult novels today are about teens in post-apocalyptic dystopias instead of high school babysitter's clubs, and why there are no new Nu Metal bands touring the country. Nowhere else is the constantly shifting nature of popular trends more readily apparent then the horror genre, which cycles through sub genres faster then a crazed maniac cuts through flesh. Slasher films, PG-13 Japanese remakes, torture porn, and supernatural stories are just a few of the most recent and prevalent trends in the genre in the last 30 years, and since horror films are traditionally cheap to produce, the Hollywood production machine can use them to chase the latest trend easier and faster then other genres. Since 2007, found footage horror has been one of the most popular trends given its emphasis on spooky implication and inference over big budget special effects and gore gags. However, over the past couple of years the sub genre has shown signs of age, most evident in the way that filmmakers have experimented with the limitations of the form, combining it with other sub genres and even deconstructing it. Earlier this year, director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett announced a new film entitled The Woods, leaving many to speculate as to what this movie was about, given that there was no other information available and no knowledge of it before it was announced. At a San Diego Comic Con screening of the film, it was revealed that the movie's real title was Blair Witch, and it came as a huge surprise. Once the shock had worn off, though, it seemed all too appropriate for a sequel to TheBlair Witch Project, the film that birthed found footage horror way back in 1999, to emerge from the darkness this year. For Wingard and Barrett's Blair Witch is a homecoming for found footage horror, bringing the sub genre full circle with a summation of all that it can do.

Blair Witch is a horror sequel in the classic mold, following the original film's structure and providing new concepts within that rather then blazing its own path (as opposed to the bold yet compromised Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2). James (James Allen McCune) is the younger brother of the first film's Heather, obsessed with finding evidence that his sister may still be alive somewhere in the Black Hills woods of Maryland. When he acquires a video found near the woods that he believes points the way to finding his sister, his friends Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid) along with documentarian Lisa (Callie Hernandez) trek off to Burkittsville. There, they meet up with Blair witch conspiracy theorists Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry) and head off to camp in the deep woods. From then on, the film plays like a Greatest Hits of The Blair Witch Project: creepy stick figures, rock piles, horrifying noises, geographical confusion, mysterious disappearances, a scary dilapidated house, the end.

They're gonna break that rule.

By far the weakest aspect of Blair Witch is that it apes the original closely without being able to recapture Project's pervasive sense of frustration and dread. Granted, for a lot of people The Blair Witch Project's power came from the fact that its marketing campaign successfully convinced them that it might be real, but that's discounting just how well the original film creates a verisimilitude all its own. Anyone who loves camping, hates camping, or has simply gotten lost in the woods before can watch The Blair WitchProject and become anxious along with the characters at their plight, long before any supposed supernatural happenings occur. Blair Witch, however, doesn't linger on building characters or a mood, but rather barrels ahead to the next gag or occurrence. This means that the film is never boring, as the camaraderie of the cast and Editor Louis Cioffi's cutting keeps the pace up, but it robs the film of any depth it might have had. Right from the get go, it's unclear why James is so obsessed with finding his sister (and why his friends are so game to follow him) when he was barely old enough when she disappeared to remember her, and especially when the mysterious video he sees that inspires him to try to find her is so troubling it should give most people pause. When the characters of The Blair Witch Project went into the woods, we knew who they were in relation to each other, how they felt about each other, and what seeds were planted as to how things might turn sour between them. The most memorable relationship in BlairWitch is between Peter and Lane, and it's a completely antagonistic one that we get to see develop on screen. Any other interpersonal relationships between the characters are mostly off screen, which may hew closely to realism (as many private moments are not likely to be captured on video) but given the fact that Lisa is meant to be shooting a documentary on James at first and not on spooky goings on in the woods, it's a missed opportunity.

Ironically these shortcomings go hand in hand with the film's biggest strengths, that being that Wingard and Barrett have constructed an immersive haunted house-esque experience that is utterly nightmarish and relentless and always visually compelling. This is a quality the two developed on their previous found footage work for the V/H/S films, being able to manipulate an audience and give them just enough payoff to every scare and gag to have the fear linger in the mind. One of their best innovations is what I'd consider to be the main reason a Blair Witch sequel would be of interest in this day & age, that being the inclusion of up to date technology used by the campers. Similar to other great horror sequels like Aliens and [REC] 2, our characters venture into the woods armed not with weapons but the latest in communication and navigation tech, up to and including a drone controlled by smartphone app. It's not only a great escalation of the hubris from the first film (in which Heather memorably chanted that they would find their way out of the forest if they just kept walking because "this is America!") but it allows Wingard to create some excellent visuals. Cutting between last gen digital video, current gen HD and Bluetooth style personal cameras, the film's visual style becomes more deliberate and assured as it goes on, while still keeping things "shaky cam" enough to not break the illusion. I never expected to see some fantastic compositions in a found footage movie, and Blair Witch provides that.

CAMPING IS SO FUN YOU GUYS

The movie's final act is a marvel, opening up the mythology of the series and providing payoffs to set ups you may not have even realized were there. For the most part the film was shot in a real forest in Vancouver, but this final act takes place in a house designed by Production Designer Thomas S. Hammock, and his work adds to the experience admirably. Flashes of light shine brightly through slots between planks of old, rotten wood as the rain outside seeps through the roof, the light illuminating the eerie writings etched on the walls. It both recreates and expands the house from the end of The BlairWitch Project, and provides the film with its best visual palette. It energizes Wingard's technique as well, resulting in a bravura sequence in which Callie Hernandez's Lisa is trapped in a tunnel, the camera cutting between her POV and a handheld camera pushed several feet in front of her. It's during this act that Lisa becomes a character in the mold of Wingard & Barrett's prior heroines (particularly Sharni Vinson in You're Next and Maika Monroe in The Guest) and it's fantastic to watch.

Blair Witch may start slow, but by the end reinvigorates not just the series but found footage horror itself. Barrett clearly loves the first film and its mythology enough to keep its continuity intact here, both paying homage to the lore as well as expanding it and adding compelling new wrinkles. Wingard (along with Director of Photography Robby Baumgartner) backs him up with the visuals, even working in a sly nod to the most iconic shot of the first film. While the characters themselves might be thin, the cast is a blast to watch, and their chemistry with each other is very well presented. They also freak out incredibly well, naturally. If you’re not normally a fan of found footage horror movies or not a fan of the original Blair Witch, stay away, as there’s nothing here that will convince you to come around. If you’re a fan of either or both, however, you can’t do any better than this filmmaking team. Found footage horror may be on its way out, destined to be a goofy meta parody (Found Footage 3D is just such a film due for release soon) before heading out to pasture, but it's fantastic that the Blair Witch came back at least once more to show the sub genre she created who's boss.

There was a brief moment, however, when I believed it to be real. It was the spring of 1999, and I was in the thick of my high school experience. The internet was in the process of slowly changing from "that thing that takes a while to work on the family computer" to "the place I check the news on a daily basis", and through a couple of the websites I followed I read about an upcoming movie that supposedly contained real footage of three filmmakers who had been missing since 1994. Doing some more digging, I found that the film they had been working on was to be a documentary about a legend of their local witch, the Blair Witch of Maryland. I was spooked, and the eerie mystery surrounding the film set my mind racing. Later that summer, the Sci-Fi Channel (which I watched religiously in those days) aired a documentary special of its own, Curse of the Blair Witch. I saw it at my cousins house with some relatives and my brother, and it was during this viewing that my burgeoning cynicism toward the media caused me to have an epiphany: this was all a ruse, and the movie was just a giant prank of a horror film. After all, what kind of corporation (even an independent studio like Artisan Entertainment) would dare attempt to sell viewings of real, borderline snuff footage for profit? There were no missing filmmakers, and there wasn't even a Blair Witch. I didn't feel betrayed, however; on the contrary, I found the idea incredibly clever, and marveled at how well the documentary special was faked. One of my cousins took the bait hook, line and sinker, terrified that the Blair Witch was real. I, on the other hand, was thrilled to be in on the joke.

Later that summer when I finally saw The Blair Witch Project itself, I enjoyed the film, yet found it too tame to get under my skin, too vague to be affecting, too...well, fake. I had seen the man behind the curtain too early, and it killed the momentum of scary hype surrounding the movie's release. Nevertheless I respected the film quite a bit, both as a nascent horror nerd and an aspiring filmmaker. Just like hundreds of other film geeks who saw the movie, my friends and I shot our own version/parody of the film, which we all thought was pretty clever at the time (though we were sorely lacking in technical craft and understanding of how the real movie had been lit: our version was only about 20% visible). After that, the film faded into the back of my consciousness, a slight footnote in my film loving history. The Blair Witch Project was an outlier, a shrewd prank, unique to real and wannabe filmmakers used to the experience of shooting a ton of digital video but uncommon to everyone else.

Then something momentous happened; the entire world changed. Not suddenly, for such cultural changes always happen subtly, but little by little the Internet took over our lives, and with it came an abundance of screens and footage. Self-shot footage, no longer the purview of people on vacation and short family home movies, became a norm, resulting in everything from daily updates on people's lives to thousands of amateur films just like The Blair Witch Project. The movie's influence was especially felt within narratives told through new media, with Alternate Reality Games becoming popularized, both as standalone experiences and as larger viral marketing campaigns for major motion pictures and television shows. Some of these narratives even fooled people into believing its veracity, just as Curse of the Blair Witch had. The ubiquitousness of people using camera devices began to seep onto movie screens, hitting the culture in a big way with 2008's Cloverfield. That movie was made almost a decade after The Blair Witch Project, and yet much of its narrative structure and visual style is undeniably influenced by it.

The Blair Witch Project wasn't technically the first found footage film, as there had been a handful of examples prior, most notably Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust from 1980. However, that film still contained a framing device involving a character examining and commenting on the footage they, and we, were seeing. The Blair Witch Project, on the other hand, contained merely a small text legend at the beginning, and the rest was the "unedited" footage shot by the characters, presented without outside context.

In 2007, Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity copied this form that Blair Witch had invented, everything from using the actor's real names for the characters to a lack of a music score and having a simple credit crawl at the end. The film was such a success that it managed to break the stranglehold the Saw franchise had on the Halloween movie season, and its sequels continued to dominate multiplexes in October for years afterward. Paranormal Activity popularized the form, and Cloverfield expanded it to a wider audience. Cloverfield took the same cues from Blair Witch, keeping the "it's actually just a movie" elements relegated to the opening studio logo and the end credit crawl. It also ran its own influential and successful viral marketing campaign just as BlairWitch had, similarly using it to expand and inform the fictional story's mythology. Cloverfield cemented the form of the modern found footage film based on the success of The Blair Witch Project while expanding it to a new genre, and a genre unto itself was properly born. Numerous other films followed suit. From there, found footage went through its avant garde period, moving through other genres such as science fiction, comedy, and drama, and through experimental and conceptual twists within the horror genre (such as in the V/H/S films). Found footage became common enough that a film made in such a style nowadays is no longer a gimmick, but merely another aesthetic choice.

Now, in 2016, things are coming full circle, as a surprise Blair Witch sequel was announced during the San Diego International Comic-Con in July. Horror stalwarts Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (they of the fantastic You're Next and The Guest, as well as segments of the V/H/S films) are the filmmakers behind it, and the film will be firmly in the found footage genre that the original movie pioneered. That's in stark contrast to Blair Witch's other, much maligned sequel, Blair Witch 2: Book Of Shadows, which at least attempted to strike its own path and not repeat its predecessor's form. It was made in a different time, however, before found footage had become a legitimate genre in its own right. The time is perfect to honor the original film's legacy, which is why I sat down with it just the other night, for the first time since the turn of the century.

To my surprise, The Blair Witch Project frightened me.

Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams in The Blair Witch Project

This isn't due to the film's backstory, which remains incredibly slight. Part of the meta narrative that writer/directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez constructed for the film, that it was all real, naturally loses its power after the initial viewing (or as in my case, before). Watching the faux documentary they made with Ben Rock, Curse of theBlair Witch, beforehand would certainly enrich and deepen the mythology behind the film's storyline and give its villain a bit more weight, but not to any huge degree. We end up knowing a great deal about the characters' relationships to each other, but other then that most of the backstory is doled out in tiny morsels, just barely enough to hang a mythology on. There's a good reason that the Blair Witch never became popular as a character in her own right, and that's simply because she isn't one. She's not even visibly in the film!

Of course, that's all by design, as Myrick and Sanchez constructed the movie to be a bare bones experience rather then a tightly scripted thematic narrative. Nothing is more powerful in horror then simplicity, and The Blair Witch Project couldn't be simpler. It's similar in intent to the best slashers ever made, insofar as those films were tightly constructed machines geared toward the next outrageous kill scene. Here, Myrick and Sanchez employ an almost completely opposite tactic of being less writer/directors and more puppet masters, setting up situations that allow the actors to react as completely and truthfully as possible, to present a film as close as possible to an authentic, immediate, real experience. Rather then setting up a perfect shot to sell an intricate kill gag, the directors sent their actors into the woods with a map and walkie talkies, having them actually live (and document) the experience of hiking to a predetermined campsite, set up camp, sleep...and then be awoken by strange noises in the distance that the directors and friends of theirs would make. As a result of this (again, then radical) style of filmmaking, there was no script per se, and the majority of the dialogue was improvised by the actors. The film was also shot by the actors, resulting in not only a naturalistic look, but, thanks to the directors' inclusion of a 16mm camera as well as a digital video camera, a variety of visual styles that keeps the movie from being dull.

All of this lends the film a feeling of authenticity that no film since (in the world of fiction, that is) has come close to matching. Subsequent found footage films, despite mimicking Blair Witch's style, started to construct gags, moments and shots that would be captured professionally by characters supposedly unused to filmmaking. This lent those films a lot of entertainment value, and are clever in their own right, but never allow for the immediacy and truth that Blair Witch does. Similarly, most other found footage films contain mostly improvised dialogue, but performed by actors (or even professional improvisers) more used to working with improvisation. Improvising in films was still very rare in 1999, and as such actors Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams and Joshua Leonard are under no pressure to be funny or clever or scary, so they can only be real.

It's that reality that so affected me during my recent viewing of the film. I marveled at the eerie sounds surrounding the group at night, I became anxious and frustrated as the three got lost in the woods, I got creeped out when (the dead?) Josh's disembodied voice cried out for help, and I was teary-eyed along with Heather as she gave her final monologue to the camera. Removed from the hype machine in which it was originally released, and viewed with all the hindsight of a decade and change of subsequent found footage films, The Blair Witch Project is a remarkable and authentic experience.

The testament to the film's power lies in its final scene, which perfectly encapsulates the film's genius simplicity. For a movie that I believed for years to be "unmemorable", I found myself total recall-ing elements while watching that I had unknowingly burned onto my brain (shots used in numerous trailers and commercials for the film, "I kicked that fucker into the creek!", "all lights off", and so on). But one moment I never forgot is the ending, which anyone who's seen the film will instantly remember. Unlike other horror films (or even just films in general), there's hardly anything to it. It's a simple shot of Mike standing in the corner of a dilapidated basement facing the wall while Heather screams and films. She is then attacked offscreen by something unseen (indeed, unknowable), the camera hits the ground and cuts to black. On paper that may sound far too slight, dull even. Yet the entire structure of the film, its vague implications and set ups and its pervasive mood, all lead to this moment, and imbue it with a dreadful, frightening power. For months afterward, conspiracy theorists spoke about how the film was actually real (until the actual actors began appearing in public to debunk it). For years afterward, no one else attempted to make another major found footage film, giving the movie even more cultural significance. The legacy of The Blair Witch Project is that it not only left an entire genre of film in its wake, but made its reality our own, if only for a moment.